A game-theory analysis of the rat-group attack in smart grids

More and more intelligent functions are proposed, designed and implemented in meters to make the power supply be smart. However, these complex functions also bring risks to the smart meters, and they become susceptible to vulnerabilities and attacks. We present the rat-group attack in this paper, which exploits the vulnerabilities of smart meters in the cyber world, but spreads in the physical world due to the direct economic benefits. To the best of our knowledge, no systematic work has been conducted on this attack. Game theory is then applied to analyze this attack, and two game models are proposed and compared under different assumptions. The analysis results suggest that the power company shall follow an open defense policy: disclosing the defense parameters to all users (i.e., the potential attackers), results in less loss in the attack.